Laurence Mawhinney retired in October after 33 years as Lunenburg’s mayor. A Presbyterian minister of 46 years, Mawhinney has written more than 10,000 sermons and now serves in four Lunenburg County churches. Before moving to Lunenburg in 1973, he ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals both federally —against Elmer MacKay — and provincially, and he also worked as Michael Kirby’s executive assistant when Kirby was principal assistant to then-premier Gerald Regan in the 1970s. At age seven, Mawhinney moved with his family from bomb-stricken Belfast, Northern Ireland, to the small fishing village of Rose Bay, Lunenburg County, and then to many other small Maritime communities.

Lessons Mawhinney has learned about leadership:

“I was a son of a minister and his wife. We moved around a fair bit during my growing years. I think I went to something like 10 different schools in 12 years, and so communities changed for me in their scope, size I guess the essence of almost every place that we’ve lived in Canada was that there was a sense of community to it and there was always the adaptation of life to a new community.

“I think leadership is first about learning who and what makes up your community, what makes those people tick, listening to them, hearing their stories, getting to know why they are the way they are. I think I had to do that repeatedly as the family moved, whether to Montreal or to P.E.I. or to Cape Breton. All of them were distinctly different communities and you had to learn what experiences forged these people in their lives.”

“Out of the sense of community I found there, and trying to understand the community, it helped me to understand what I believe community is, and that I think has helped to drive my approach to community living and any form of leadership that I’ve played a part in.”

“I don’t think I’m a natural leader. I think I came naturally to some places where maybe leadership evolved.

“I think basically it’s first of all learning your community, whether it’s a team or whether it’s a town or whether it’s a province — learning what it is that makes this place the place it is, and learning what makes a town like Lunenburg special.”

“Leadership doesn’t come from finding out where your people want to go and leading them there, leadership comes about from trying to understand where we ought to go and then convincing them why they ought to follow you in that direction.”

“Lessons I’ve learned? Listen, listen and listen. I’ve always learned more by listening than by talking, and there are lots of folks who don’t seem to have discovered that.

“Our first winter we were here, we were here about two months and a guy came to the door on about the 20th of December. He knocked on the door, he said, ‘I’m bringing you a Christmas card. I don’t know much about you but the wife said we should give you one.’ So I listened to him. I still do. You can learn an awful lot by listening to some of these people who’ve been around a long time, there’s a great innate wisdom to Maritimers. They’ve lived with the land and the sea, they’ve seen the best and the worst, and there’s a reason why there’s 660 names on that memorial on the waterfront and why the community is the way it is.”